Jeremy Levine and Carl Gershenson,
graduate students in the Harvard sociology department, combined demographic
data with data on Boston residents’ snow removal requests as a measure of civic
engagement in the vein of Earls’s collective efficacy. They found that,
predictably, neighborhoods with a higher percentage of homeowners (as opposed
to renters) demanded more services from the city. Rates of service requests
were low in neighborhoods with high concentrations of first-generation
immigrants, college students, and residents receiving public assistance. They
were surprised to find a strong correlation between the number of service
requests and a high percentage of African-American residents, and theorized
that these residents may have a lower level of trust in city government and
therefore make the same service request multiple times.

Daniel O’Brien, project manager for the
Radcliffe Institute’s Harvard-Boston Research Initiative, used the extensive dataset
generated by Boston’s Constituent Relationship Management system, which logs
all resident requests for public services, to examine the size of the
geographic area for which the average resident takes responsibility, and found
it to be quite small (the few blocks immediately surrounding one’s home).

Francisca
Rojas, a postdoctoral fellow at the HKS Ash
Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and MIT doctoral student Candace Brakewood analyzed
the effect of the MBTA’s decision to release
data showing the real-time locations and predicted arrival time of buses and
trains. Rojas and Brakewood conducted a rider survey and found that
three-quarters of respondents rated on-time arrival rates on routes they
traveled as average or worse, and were dissatisfied with the MBTA’s
communications about service delays. The researchers shared their findings with
the MBTA and will conduct another analysis in 2012.

A panel featuring new applications of technology
included David Lazer,
director of the HKS Program
on Networked Governmance; Alex
“Sandy” Pentland, who directs the MIT
Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program; Jennifer Chayes,
managing director for Microsoft Research New England; and Nigel Jacob, cochair
of the Boston Mayor’s Office of New
Urban Mechanics. With the sheer quantity of data available (such as records
of where in a city tens of thousands of cell phones have traveled on a given
day), the challenge is figuring out what to do with those data, said Lazer. Protecting that data against theft,
misuse, and breach of confidentiality is equally important, Chayes cautioned.
If privacy protections fail, “we will have a data Tuskegee, and we really don’t
want that,” she said, referring to the notorious mid-20th-century
medical research study in which hundreds of African-American men in rural
Alabama were diagnosed with syphilis, but neither told nor treated, as the
researchers studied the disease’s course if left untreated.